Posts

Blogroll

Day 2 of Making a Movie- “Rough Budgets and Breakdowns”

Hello everyone!! In the first stages of movie making, you can’t really hit the ground running because you don’t have financing in place, so in the mean time, what can be done are all those primary steps of pre-production that your gonna have to do anyway, so you mind as well take the time to do it now before you’ve got all your money in the bank. For me, that has included creating an extremely rough budget, and starting to do a script breakdown.

First, the rough budget. When I asked God to give me an idea for a feature film that I could make for $10,000 at the locations that I already have access to, he gave me the idea for Youth of Christ. Then, when the script was finished in December, in my mind that $10,000 had sky rocketed to at least a million if we were going to do the film the way I saw it in my head. God kept at me though, saying that I could do it on the mini-budget. So now I’ve created a really rough estimate of what everything is going to cost, and if my estimates are correct, God is absolutely right. No brainer, seeing how He’s the Creator of this universe and everything, but still my faith has grown because of it. To make this ginormous movie happen (not a word, I know), most of the cast and crew will have to be volunteers, which is actually starting to seem feasible because there have already been some wonderful church people who approached me and said they want to be part of this movie, at no cost!! By the grace of God, the amount of those volunteers will keep growing, and Youth of Christ is going to happen!

Second, the script break down! This is where you go through each scene of the script (Youth of Christ has 140 of them), you write down the location, whether it’s day or night, interior or exterior, how many pages the scene is, what cast members are in the scene, what extras are in the scene (speaking and non-speaking), and what special props, wardrobes, or vehicles you need in the scene. While this is kind of boring to do, it’s my absolute favorite part of development, because this is where I see what day we’re shooting what scene on. Right now, the production for Youth of Christ is scheduled for April 12th-21st, 2010. Youth of Christ is a 150 page screenplay (insane, I know, but I just don’t know what to cut out). So, this means I’ll need to shoot an average of 15 pages per day, which is crazy, because big Hollywood shoots usually shoot two and a half pages per day! Doing the script break down enables my mind to begin figuring out how we’re going to schedule scenes so that we can meet our goal of 15 pages per day, and wrap our shoot on time.

All in all, praise God this whole experience has been SO MUCH FUN, and since my big sister is in town this weekend AND I start my final semester at Nova Southeastern on Monday, it’s about to get a little hectic planning both the film production and living life. But that is the joy of the job I have, and I am SO GRATEFUL to Jesus for letting me have it!!

Thanks so much for being part of this production!! God bless you, and as always, God bless your ministry!!